The Stress of Her Regard

by Tim Powers

  He supposed she could break one of the windows and saw open her neck on the jagged edges, or open the door and throw herself off the precipice, but he would hear her beginning either of those, and could conceivably get down in time to stop her—and she looked too weak for any strenuous suicide anyway.

  He leaned out for another breath, and then quickly but gently untied the knots he’d pulled tight twelve hours ago in front of the Casa Magni.

  He closed the door and climbed back up to the driver’s bench and started the carriage rolling again.

  At the border crossing Josephine was so clearly ill and incoherent, and Crawford’s explanation that she needed to get to the hospital in Parma so desperately convincing, and his bribe so handsome, and the smell of garlic so appalling, that the border guards quickly let them continue on the road east, the road that would lead them down out of the mountains.

  A few hundred yards farther on, Crawford halted the carriage and climbed down. He roused Josephine enough to get her to eat some bread and cheese with him, and he made her drink some water, reminding himself to plan a rest stop before too long.

  She cursed him weakly as he retied her hands and ankles. After a minute he realized that he was cursing her in return, and he made himself stop.

  Hand-sized wooden crucifixes stood on poles every few miles along the roadside, sheltered by tiny shingled roofs, and as the sun climbed by imperceptible degrees to the zenith, and then began to throw Crawford’s shadow out under the horses’ hooves, Crawford found himself praying to the weather-grayed little figures.

  He wasn’t precisely praying to Christ, but to all the gods who had represented humanity and had suffered for it; curled around his mental image of the wooden Christ were vague ideas of Prometheus chained to the stone with the vulture tearing at his entrails—and Balder nailed to the tree, around the roots of which flowers grew where the drops of his blood fell—and Osiris torn to pieces beside the Nile.

  He had his flask with him on the driver’s seat, and the brandy worked with the fatigue and the monotonous noises and motions of driving to lull him into a state that was nearly dreaming.

  He wished he had the time, and the hammer and nails, to stop the carriage and go pound an eisener breche into the face of one of the little wooden Christs—it would be a gesture of respect and a declaration of solidarity, not vandalism—and, after a couple of hours of wishing it, he began to imagine that he was doing it.

  The figure, in his hallucinatorily vivid daydream, lifted wooden eyelids and stared at him with tiny but unmistakably human eyes, as red blood ran down the pain-lines of the crudely chiselled face, and then it opened its wooden mouth and spoke.

  “Accipite, et bibite ex eo omnes.”

  It was Latin, and he translated it mentally: All of you take and drink of this.

  He was pretty sure it was a line from the Catholic Mass, said when the priest changed the wine into Christ’s blood.

  Crawford noticed now that a rusty iron cup hung under the crucifix, and that the blood had run down the legs into the cup. He reached for the cup, but a cloud passed over the sun then, and the figure on the eclipsed cross was himself, and while he was watching himself from someone else’s eyes he thrust an eisenerbreche into the side of the crucified figure.

  Water ran out of the wound, and he didn’t have to taste it to know that it was salty—seawater. The water puddled and deepened, and filled the cellar and spilled out into the Arno, which somehow was also the Thames and the Tiber, and flowed out to sea; the little roof over the crucifix became a boat, but it was too far out at sea by now for Crawford to know which boat it was. The Don Juan? The ark? One boat to save us by sinking, Crawford thought dizzily, one to save us by surviving.

  He realized that his flask was empty, and that the sun had set behind them. They were down among the wooded foothills now, and he blinked back over his shoulder at the red-lit mountain peaks, through whose stony domain this little box of warm organic life had travelled, and he shivered and thanked the hallucinated Christ, or whoever it had been, for the horses, and even for Josephine.

  Somewhere ahead lay the ancient walled city of Parma—once a Gallic town, then an important Roman city, and now a possession, with the blessing of the Austrians, of the French; its royal gardens and promenades were supposed to be among the most beautiful in Italy. Crawford just hoped that whatever stable he would find for them to sleep in would have straw lying around, so that he and Josephine could sleep out of the malodorous carriage.

  CHAPTER 24

  Their watchmen stare, and stand aghast,

  As on we hurry through the dark;

  The watch-light blinks as we go past,

  The watch-dog shrinks and fears to bark …

  —George Crabbe

  Perhaps because Parma was occupied by Austrian-sanctioned forces, no priest came to the stable to harry the vampire’s woman out of town. The stable owner slid open the heavy wooden door at dawn, and plodded inside to open one of the stalls and lead a horse out, but he didn’t even look toward where Crawford and Josephine lay on a luxuriously thick pile of straw, covered by a spare horse-blanket.

  Crawford wished Byron had thought to pack blankets.

  The man led the horse outside, and Crawford threw the blanket aside and stood up. He went to the carriage, but the jug of water had somehow picked up the ubiquitous garlic smell, and he cursed and took one of Byron’s crystal glasses to a horse-trough and dipped up some water. It didn’t taste bad, and he refilled the glass and took it over to Josephine.

  He crouched by her, and for several seconds just looked at her lean, strained face. She had still been awake when he had gone to sleep, staring at the ceiling and flexing her bound wrists and ankles, and he wondered when she had finally let herself sleep.

  He shook her shoulder gently, and her eyes sprang open.

  “It’s me, Michael,” he said, trying to make it sound reassuring, even though he knew that his was the face she least cared to see. “Sit up so I can give you some water.”

  She hiked herself up and obediently sipped from the glass he tilted to her mouth. After a few sips she shook her head, and he held the glass away.

  “You can untie me,” she said hoarsely. “I won’t try to run.”

  “Or kill yourself?”

  She looked away. “Or kill myself.”

  “I can’t,” he said wearily. “Even if it was just you, I wouldn’t. I love you, and I won’t cooperate in your death. But anyway, it’s not just you. There’s a child.”

  “It’s his,” she said. Her voice was listless. “I really think it’s his. They can have children by us, you know.”

  Crawford thought of Shelley’s half sister, who had grown inside Shelley’s body while he was still in his mother’s womb, and had by that prolonged contact infected him and made him not entirely human. Josephine’s haggard face reminded him of the wooden Christ-face he had imagined yesterday, and he prayed that the human fetus was all that Josephine carried.

  “The child is human,” he told her. “Remember I’m a doctor that specializes in this. You were already pregnant when you first—when you first had intercourse with Polidori.” He looked away so that she wouldn’t see the rage in his eyes. “Even if Polidori has succeeded in impregnating you too—they can do that, the inhuman fetus grows with, or even in, the human one that was already there—our child is still there, and will be at least as human as Shelley was.”

  She closed her eyes—he saw with sudden compassion that her eyelids were deeply wrinkled—and tears ran down her cheeks. “Oh,” she said miserably.

  For perhaps a full minute neither of them spoke. A horse poked its head around a stall partition and peered at the two of them, then snorted and stepped back out of sight.

  Josephine sighed. “So it might even be … twins.”

  “Yes.”

  Josephine shuddered, and Crawford recalled that she herself had been one of a pair of twins, and that her mother had bled to death within minutes of giv
ing birth to her.

  The stable owner walked back into the building and, still not looking over at Crawford and Josephine, opened another stall. Crawford tensed, ready to jump on Josephine and cover her mouth—but when it became clear that she wasn’t going to shout for help he was grateful for the interruption; he needed to think.

  Would it help, he wondered as the man led another horse out, to remind her of her mother’s death? It had, with the help of her sister Julia, effectively wrecked her youth. Would being reminded of it make her more suicidal, or more concerned for the well-being of her child? Would it help to remind her of what Keats went through so that his sister would not become the prey of his vampire?

  She had now gone two full nights without giving blood to Polidori, and Crawford remembered, from his long-ago week in Switzerland, how hard it was to do without that erosion of personality, once one had grown used to it.

  She’s probably only now beginning to be able to think for herself, he thought. And she’ll be hating it. Will she acknowledge the responsibilities that she can now clearly see, or will they be so appalling that she’ll just want to return to the selfless haze?

  “I thought,” she said when the man had left, “that there’d be no difference if I

  killed myself. If the baby was his, suicide would just … speed up its birth.”

  “And your … rebirth.”

  She nodded. “I’d finally be able to stop being me, Josephine; I really would be just a walking … thing.”

  “But now,” said Crawford carefully, “you know that our child would be too.”

  Josephine’s eyes were wide now, and it occurred to Crawford that she looked trapped. “But we,” she whispered, “we killed her, the woman that loved you. I can’t … know that, I can’t let myself know that.”

  Crawford took her shoulders. “It wasn’t Julia,” he said. “It wasn’t your sister. I know you know that, but you haven’t … what, digested it. The thing we killed was a goddamn flying lizard, like that thing that tried to kill you—and our child—two nights ago. It was a vampire.”

  She lowered her head and nodded, and he saw a tear fall onto the knot at her wrists.

  Too tired to worry anymore, he released her shoulders and began untying the knot.

  When the stable owner came in again, Josephine and Crawford were standing together by the carriage, clinging to each other. The man smiled and muttered something about a more before going to the next stall.

  They traded Byron’s carriage for a less elegant but fresher-smelling one, loaded all their baggage into it, and then paid for a room at a hotel just so that they could bathe and get into clean clothes. Crawford even shaved—and, after agonizing about it for a minute, decided not to hide the razor.

  Crawford was careful to wait in the hall while Josephine took her bath and got dressed; he was dimly and incredulously beginning to hope that the two of them might someday marry after all—if they weren’t killed in Venice, and if she was carrying only one child—but he could imagine her withdrawing totally if he even seemed to be attempting familiarities right now.

  When she stepped out of the room Crawford thought she must have left years in the bath water: her hair was clean and combed, and lustrous even in the dimness of the hall, and in one of Teresa’s dresses that Byron had packed for her she actually looked slim rather than gaunt.

  He offered her his arm; after only the slightest hesitation she took it, and together they walked to the stairs.

  They walked down the sunlit Emilian Way to the Piazza Grande, and at an outdoor table under a statue of Correggio they ate hard-boiled egg slices in tomato sauce with grilled bread and olive oil, and drank most of a bottle of Lambrusco.

  Beggars were huddled in the sun in front of the Renaissance arches of the Palazzo del Commune, and a barefoot old couple in ragged clothes had ventured out among the tables; the man was wringing a devastated hat in his hands and was talking to the well-dressed people at a table near Crawford. Thankful for his own clean clothes and good food and wine, Crawford pulled a bundle of lire from his pocket and waited for the couple to make their way to the table at which he and Josephine sat.

  Then he noticed the Austrian soldiers. They must have come into the square several seconds earlier, for they were already spread out and walking purposefully across the square. Two of them seized the old couple and began marching them away, and, looking past them, Crawford saw that the soldiers had rounded up all the beggars and were herding them out of the square.

  Suddenly ashamed of his apparent affluence, he crumpled the bills and let them fall to the pavement. In the breeze the wad of paper scooted away across the flagstones like a little boat.

  “Parma’s new Austrian masters don’t seem to approve of beggars,” he said to Josephine as he pushed his chair back and stood up. “Let’s go—I hate seeming to be part of the crowd they’re protecting from them.”

  Josephine too looked sickened by the spectacle, and stood up. “I think we’ve done Parma,” she said in a sprightly imitation of the voice of an English tourist. “Do let’s be moving on toward Venice.”

  Crawford was delighted to see even weak, ironic humor in her. “The Tintoretto Last Supper!” he exclaimed fatuously, trying to maintain her mood.

  “The Verrocchio Colleoni!” she chimed in; then, perhaps because she’d seen drawings of that grim mounted statue, her affected smile collapsed. “Back to the hotel?”

  “Just for the carriage. Our old clothes they can keep.”

  Austrian guards were checking everyone who was leaving the city through the high stone arch of the north gate, but the soldier who checked their carriage just leaned in the window and looked at Josephine, then peered up at Crawford with a disapproving air; he sniffed officiously and waved them on.

  The carriage moved forward out of the shadow into the hot sunlight, and then the horses bounded forward, as if tired of the slow pace of city traffic. The road northward curled away ahead of them across the Po Valley, and for several hours Crawford drove happily between wide fields of yellow earth on which the vines and peach trees made geometrical figures in livid green.

  A number of horses and carriages passed them, but he was not anxious to reach the nightmare end of this journey, and he wanted the horses to be fresh for the drive through Lombardy and Venetia tomorrow, so he maintained their leisurely pace.

  In a couple of hours they had reached a village called Brescello that sat on the marshy banks of the Po. Crawford thought about stopping, but the air was full of some kind of lint that was making him sneeze, and he tilted his hat back and squinted along the western riverbank to see where the bridge was.

  Suddenly the carriage rocked violently on its springs, and a black-bearded young man was sitting beside him.

  Crawford darted a hand toward the pistol under his coat, but the man caught his wrist with a browned hand. Crawford instinctively looked at the hand, thinking of breaking the grip—and then noticed the black mark between the thumb and forefinger. It looked very much like the two-year-old stain on his own palm.

  He looked up into a pair of fierce brown eyes. “Carbonari,” the man said.

  Crawford nodded, a little relieved. “Si?” he said.

  The man spoke rapidly in what Crawford at first thought was French; then he recognized it as the patois of Piedmont, which lay westward up the valley, and he managed to translate it mentally. “You must go down the river,” the man had said, “not across into Lombardy. Running water—it throws them off the scent.”

  “Uh … who,” asked Crawford carefully, unconsciously trying to match the accent, “do you think we are?”

  The man had taken the reins from Crawford and was goading the horses east down a narrower dirt track, away from the bridge.

  “I think,” he said, “that you are the couple who traded in a carriage reeking of garlic, in Parma this morning; the couple who got by the border guards at the Cisa Pass yesterday because of a sick woman, and a big bribe to men who are in some trouble no
w.”

  Suddenly Crawford remembered the guards in the Piazza that morning, who had been arresting everyone who looked as shabby as Crawford and Josephine had the day before; and he remembered the guard who had passed them through the Parma gate after having sniffed the carriage. Crawford was profoundly glad that he and Josephine had happened to abandon Byron’s vehicle.

  The new carriage was among wooden shacks now, and the lint in the air was worse. Crawford sneezed six times in succession.

  “They’re steeping the harvested flax crop,” Crawford’s guide said. “The air will be full of the stuff for days.” He threw a quick glance sideways at Crawford.

  “You have no drink to offer a fellow soldier?”

  “Sorry. Here.” Crawford handed him the flask, and the man drank everything that was in it and handed it back. “Thanks. My name’s della Torre.”

  “I’m—” Crawford began, but the man quickly held up his stained hand.

  “I don’t want to know,” he said. “There was a description of the two of you, mentioning your Carbonari mark, in a message an Austrian courier was bringing from Lerici yesterday. Our people killed him in the mountains.” He looked over his shoulder, back toward the bridge. “Clearly the courier they killed was not the only one they sent.”

  “Have the Austrians followed us here?” Crawford asked. “Perhaps we should abandon this carriage too….”

  “Yes, you should and you will, but not at this moment. They are not here yet—I passed them half an hour ago on the road from Parma, on a faster horse than any of the soldiers had, and I only got here a few minutes ago.”

  “Do you know … what it is they want us for?” Crawford asked. Shelley’s heart? he wondered; the men I killed in Rome? Both?

  “No,” said della Torre, “and I don’t want to know. I just assume you’re on Carbonari business.”